Carnegie Mellon AI Beats Chinese Poker Players

Noam Brown, Ph.D. student in computer science, oversees a five-day poker exhibition in Hainan, China, in which the artificial intelligence program he co-created defeated six human players.

Artificial intelligence has once again triumphed over human poker players, as a program developed by Carnegie Mellon University researchers beat six Chinese players by a total of $792,327 in virtual chips during a five-day, 36,000-hand exhibition that ended today in Hainan, China.

The AI program, called Lengpudashi or "cold poker master," is a version of Libratus, the CMU AI that beat four top poker professionals during a 20-day, 120,000-hand Heads-Up No-Limit Texas Hold'em competition in January in Pittsburgh.

Strategic Machine Inc., a company founded by Tuomas Sandholm, professor of computer science and co-creator of Libratus/Lengpudashi with computer science Ph.D. student Noam Brown, will take home a pot worth approximately $290,000.

The human players, called Team Dragons, were led by Alan Du, a Shanghai venture capitalist who won a 2016 World Series of Poker bracelet.

Though Libratus and Lengpudashi played different numbers of hands in their separate competitions, Lengpudashi's final margin of victory was bigger — by 220 milli-big-blinds per game vs. 147 milli-big-blinds per game for Libratus. A milli-big blind is one-thousandth of the bet required to win a game, and milli-big-blinds per game is a standard metric for comparing poker efficiency.

The exhibition was organized by Kai-Fu Lee, a CMU alumnus and former faculty member who is CEO of Sinovation Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in startups in China and the United States. He is a former executive of Apple, Microsoft and Google, and is one of the most prominent figures in China's internet sector. Sinovation and Hainan Resort Software Community hosted the exhibition.